Creating A Roadmap Just Got Easier

It is a common theme today for business leaders to make the comment that architecture groups, as they relate to information and technology within a business, are not necessary and bring little value to the company. I’ve heard it said a number of times even more so that what the architecture team does best is create piles upon piles of documentation that no one reads – doorstops, bookends, shelfware!

The Chief Operating Officer at a company where I was hired as Chief Architect asked me on my first day, “Why should I care that you are here and what value do you bring to me, my team and the company?” Though the question seemed a bit harsh (for a first question since I had already been hired)  it was the right question to ask. I went on to explain why he should care and, in some detail, communicated what the value was to him, his team and the company. This discussion took on the form of what is to follow in this article.

Roadmaps need to be strategically purposeful! The problem is, most of the roadmaps I have seen over a long career have to do with the technology landscape, its current state and what needs to be upgraded or replaced at some point in the future. The best of these poor roadmaps contains information about the cost the business should plan to spend in the coming year or years relative to technology upgrades. While this information is necessary and useful it does not constitute a roadmap. At best, this information is a component of the roadmap, tracked, more appropriately under the heading of risk analysis as part of the asset lifecycle management program. 

A good roadmap in 5 (somewhat) easy steps!

While it’s true the steps are not THAT easy, the return on effort by executing the steps is so worth it!

Prioritize Asset Lifecycle and Risk

 Step 1 – Risk-based Asset Lifecycle Prioritization

Technology or applications that are no longer supported by the vendor represent a risk to the company. The significance of the risk is two-fold. First, if the component or application is critical to the organization being able to deliver its product or services (if it breaks production/service would cease) the risk to the company is high and as such the priority for spending for these items is high. The further from critical path the component or application sits from the critical services, the less the risk to the company and the lower the prioritization for spend. Secondly, if the component or application sits next to the perimeter or is public facing and/or networked and is no longer being patched by the vendor, then it is a critical risk and must be considered for upgrade or replacement. As you can see, however, each of the scenarios are about risk and what must be done to mitigate it.

An organization’s asset management team (for those companies who have an asset management team) should already be aware of those components and applications which are expiring and can provide the information for the purpose of prioritizing the recommended spend plan based on the risk profile of each. In addition, the cyber security or operations team will know which components and applications are outward facing. Use the data you previously considered a roadmap and stage it at this point in the process as step one. It retains its importance but is not the star of the show.

 Strategic Objectives

 Step 2 – Determine Strategic Objectives

The architect of any company whose idea of a roadmap is upgrading or replacing current systems or applications is designing a stairway leading nowhere. The business leaders don’t need someone to design a roadmap to nowhere, they can achieve that on their own without effort or the extra expense of your salary! The roadmap must reflect the path for the leaders of the business to achieve THIER strategic objectives and consider such things as integration of current systems with new technology and just as importantly, the decommissioning of old technology from the environment (simplification). Don’t consider merely abandoning in place – get rid of it!

Meet with the leaders of the C-Suite to understand the corporate strategy from their personal perspective. Ask what in their personal view is driving the corporate strategy and the underlying strategic objectives. Meet with the line-of-business leaders and discuss in detail which of the strategic objectives is central to their goals and how achieving each drives accomplishment of criteria laid out in their incentive plan. Next, bring your area of subject matter expertise to the conversation and provide technological recommendations that will objectively, clearly (in terms that matter to them) and substantially accelerate the achievement their objectives and their ability to achieve 100% of their incentive compensation. Note: The Corporate and/or Line-of-Business strategy(ies) may be a bit vague but those who lead their area will be crystal clear on what they need to achieve or change to realize their bonus – these are your areas focus for the next year.

Economic Justification

Step 3 – The Economics

The third step is to build the business case to gain support and ultimately approval. You are in a good place at this point based on your conversations with business leaders and your deep understanding of how each leader defines success as it relates to them and their organization within the company. A traditional business case, however, will not cut it. Notice the title in the slide is Economic Justification and not business case. The subtitle “Accelerate and Enable” are hints toward what the justification should address. Technology for the sake of technology is a “bright light”, “Shiny object”, “squirrel!” exercise and only serves to irritate the leaders of the business. Avoid making these types of recommendations at all costs.

Economic, rather than financial denotes a number of things. First, the finances of the business case matter but the economic justification seeks to understand the business value of the capability you are recommending. What will the solution do for the business? More specifically, how does the solution accelerate or enable the achievement of the line-of-business leader’s objectives? If you are able to articulate this in clear terms you will find that you will stop feeling as though you have to push the rope uphill and “sell” every idea you have. Rather you will have difficulty keeping up as the line-of-business leader takes the reins and advocates the proposed solution to the approval body without you. Isn’t this the way it should be anyway?

The first series of questions you must ask if what you have heard from the business leader does not make it clear are these: “What business outcome are you trying to achieve?” “Does this align with your strategic objectives and how so? What business capability or outcome will this provide? If you need it, do we already have it elsewhere in the company? If we don’t have it, is it really needed? How would this capability be prioritized among all other requested activities? “What can we get rid of, if we implement this new capability?” This last question is very important and begins to build the financial case to support the economic justification in that you should be able to stop paying for something you are currently using in favor of what you are recommending.

You must still (as always) understand the cost if you are attempting to replace (unless there is nothing being replaced) a current technology. Go deep and wide in this area. Consider every capability of the proposed solution and what, aside from the obvious, this new solution could replace. Philosophically speaking, use an 80% meter for new technologies. If a new technology will replace the capabilities of a core system and at the same time address 80%+ of the requirements for systems/applications that are secondary or even tertiary to the current system, make their replacement part of the justification. Consider not just the cost of the application but everything it takes to provide the capability from hardware, to software, to labor, patching, space, cooling, etc. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself what two things can we get rid of when we implement this new system?

Relentless Simplification

Step 4 – Simplification

Simplifying is more than a single event or series of events; it is an attitude or philosophy which should become part of the culture of every company. Simply stated, unnecessarily complex environments (systems/applications/business processes) serve to confuse the work force which slows production, delay delivery of products and services and cost the company real money. Worse yet, this leads to lost opportunities, robbing the company of future revenue.

Most of us are all about creating and building but fail to understand that cleaning as you go is a necessary part of the building process. When building a house if you fail to clean up at the end of the day, the next day, you run the risk of stepping on nails, having to work around items strewn about the workplace and difficulty finding needed items. At a minimum, progress is slowed. At worst, someone gets hurt! It is not much different in a business with regard to cleaning the technical landscape as new and more capable systems are put in place. Inefficiency grows and opportunities are lost in the confusion of an inefficient and cluttered technical landscape.

Whether you start with looking at the myriad of duplicate contracts with a single vendor or overlapping technical solutions or the disparate nature of services offered to your customers, it matters little. What matters is that you get started looking at how the environment can be radically simplified. You will find that significant savings are found in these crevices of complexity. Any dollar saved goes directly to the bottom line; you find enough of these dollars and it’s as though you have won a sizeable contract for the company. In addition, each G&A function becomes more efficient and effective as the environment is simplified freeing them to perform a greater volume of value-added work. Truly, it is simplification for the win!

Accelerate Value & Communicate

Step 5 – Value Acceleration

As I allude to as part of the economic justification, the business value of any proposed solution is of utmost importance. In this section we will study this in some detail. The goal of any technology should be to bring value to the company, its leaders and shareholders and when possible the community at large. How much better would it be if the solution not only delivered value but accelerated that value and created differentiation among your business competitors? Imagine the support you would get among the most senior leaders of the business. More so, imagine how you could help catapult your businesses to another level.

We are witnessing ~100-year-old companies being overtaken by upstarts. This is all made possible by technology. Historically, what made the existing company hyper-competitive was the bar of entry for anyone wishing to compete with them was so high it made it virtually impossible. To buy the manufacturing equipment (assuming a manufacturing environment) was expensive, the business processes arduous to develop, implement and refine and all of this while trying to get things started. Getting skilled workers to leave the jobs they already had at your competitor’s business was nearly impossible without higher wages thus killing the opportunity to enter competitively. However, as technology became less expensive, employees less compelled to stay with their current employer and suppliers incentivizing new customers, upstart businesses were able to enter the marketplace.

With exponential increases in technological capability year-over-year, the bar for entry has been reduced to even greater levels. In fact, a new company who runs on the newest (and least) technology and more importantly is not dragging tons of technical debt into business, can not only enter the marketplace competitively, they can enter with such tremendous reduction in complexity, they are able to beat their competitors’ time to market and price while making a better margin. 

So, whether you work with a company that has been around over 100 years or a start-up, the secret is to be as efficient as possible. According to a study by the Hackett Group which benchmarked a number of businesses, “. . .G&A functions perform more effectively and efficiently at companies with highly effective IT organizations but, more importantly perhaps, performance suffers when the effectiveness of IT is low.”

 “How important is IT performance to the other business functions? When there is little investment in digital modernization, migration and standardization, complexity will grow exponentially. Lower productivity, agility and innovation rates are among the consequences of technology complexity. For example, in the finance function, high application complexity (measured as the number of applications per unit of revenue) increases total finance costs by 151%, compared to functions with low tech complexity. The number of finance FTEs on the payroll also jumps 186% where application complexity is high.”

The study revealed that IT is a force multiplier for business overall and this is true in both a positive and negative sense. The challenge then, becomes figuring out what you should let go of (complexity reduction) and what you should grab onto (technology as leverage).

The results of the study make it clear that building a proper roadmap for your business, not only aligns strategically but demonstrates clearly and credibly how the use of technology can be used to achieve strategic objectives and more so, accelerate their achievement. This can make the difference between a healthy and growing company and one which is slowly dying. No one in the company has the visibility, both broad and deep as does an architect. Your detailed view coupled with an understanding of what your company wants to achieve and what is delaying or limiting the ability to achieve it make you an indispensable member of the company. Don’t fail your company by delivering another technology-centered roadmap. Use your unique understanding of technology and your new understanding of the business to deliver the goods. If your company uses Business Resource Managers (BRM’s) or an equivalent role, make them your best friends. The gaps in your intimate understanding of the business can be overcome by including the BRM’s in addition to your relationship with your line-of-business leaders.

Lastly, communicate the value of the changes you have brought about. Measure the before, during and after of each effort. You can do great and wonderful things but if you fail to communicate the impact and value of the changes to the leaders of the business, you have, in effect accomplished nothing. It would seem, at times, that the value of the changes are self-evident. Don’t make this assumption! All of us maintain a rather myopic view of the world and it revolves largely around each individual. This isn’t a criticism. In order for us to be hyper-successful on what we must achieve, its easy to lose sight of those things that fall outside of our individual, narrow, field of view. It is also important how you communicate – words matter. Rather than the typical “we saved $1 million with this implementation, state it something like: “we created $10 million in revenue equivalence. Assuming 10% margin, $1 million in savings would equate to winning a $10 million contract. The point seems slight, but it makes a difference.

If you would like to know more about simplifying your technical landscape or implementing a simplification program, please reach out to me. To get on my calendar, select this link and follow the steps - https://alescent.as.me/ClarkBrown or simply reply using LinkedIn messaging. I’d love to help out!

#Simplification, #Complexity, #Savings, #Landscape, #Technical, #Relentless, #Value, #Architecture #AssetManagement, #Strategy, #Alignment, #Economic, #Roadmap

 If you enjoyed this article, please like and share. Below are links to other articles I have written and posted to LinkedIn. Please add them to your reading list.

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